Clifford Chance
Agribusiness: Global Perspectives - Opportunities for Growth
27 June 2013
Agribusinesses operate across the world and must have robust and adaptable processes in place to digest and implement the many legal and regulatory initiatives that are employed by governments and international organisations around the globe. These laws and regulations do not always fit in a neat category of “agribusiness”, but rather the agribusiness sector is incidentally affected by other, wider, regimes for instance intellectual property and national security.
We explore some examples of these in this work and look at how agribusinesses are reacting to them. Internationally, the main cross-jurisdictional framework within which agribusinesses operate is the WTO agreement on agriculture. While this has provided a degree of certainty, there are some particularly key parts of that framework which struggle to attain full recognition in some jurisdictions. In particular, the parts of that agreement dealing with export restrictions are discussed in detail in our opinion piece “Getting Food on the Table - Market Volatility and Export Restrictions in the Context of Agribusiness”.
The export restrictions we discuss come at a time when global food security is almost as significant a political and social issue as energy security. A number of factors have contributed to this. These include various recent supply uncertainties (one of the most prominent and recent examples of which is the indirect Ukrainian wheat export limitations implemented in October 2012); the steeply rising demand for protein based agricultural products in developing economies; the increasing demand for bio fuels; and the simple fact of the growing world population.
Answers to the questions these problems pose can only truly be answered with global cooperation and internationally applied rules and are the subject of much debate.
We hope you find this publication useful and thought-provoking.
